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The term began as horse racing parlance for a race horse that is not known to gamblers and thus is difficult to place betting odds on.

The earliest-known mention of the concept is in Benjamin Disraeli's novel The Young Duke (1831). Disraeli's protagonist, the Duke of St. James, attends a horse race with a surprise finish: "A dark horse which had never been thought of, and which the careless St. James had never even observed in the list, rushed past the grandstand in sweeping triumph."[3]

Politically, the concept came to America in the nineteenth century when it was first applied to James K. Polk, a relatively unknown Tennessee Democrat who won the Democratic Party's 1844 presidential nomination over a host of better-known candidates. Polk won the nomination on the ninth ballot, and went on to win the presidential election.

In a 2011 article about possible successors for Hugo Chávez, Sarah Grainger for the BBC News website referred to former army officer Diosdado Cabello, who helped Hugo Chávez to stage a failed coup in 1992, as a dark horse.[7]

In addition, surprising or unlikely nominations for such prizes as the Academy Award (awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) are referred to as dark horses.

Guitarist and singer-songwriter George Harrison was nicknamed the "dark horse" of The Beatles, as his visibility as a songwriter and vocalist increased later in the Beatles' career, particularly on Abbey Road. Harrison went on to name his solo label Dark Horse Records, and to release both an album and a song named "Dark Horse."